Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an umbrella term that refers to technologies used by publishers and/or copyright owners to control access to and usage of digital data (e.g., digital music, images, text, etc.) and digital hardware (e.g., digital media players), and to restrictions associated with specific instances of digital work or devices. For example, DRM may control the number of times that a legitimate owner of a specific instance of a digital work may reproduce that instance of work for his or her own use, to control the manner in which the owner may share the instance of work with others, or to control the manner in which the owner may transfer ownership of the instance of work to another party.
For example, a first user may wish to transfer ownership of a legally purchased MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (mp3) music file, or of a video file, to a second user, much in the same way the first user might sell a used compact disk or digital video disk of the same work. This is also referred to as a “MOVE” (as opposed to a “COPY”, which would leave the original file in place). However, the first user may have multiple copies of the mp3 or video file on various connected and disconnected devices (e.g., personal computer, personal digital assistant, digital music player, cellular telephone, etc.). Conventional methods for file transfer do not account for extra copies of transferred content, nor do they seek to eliminate these extra copies when ownership of the content changes hands. For instance, in the above example, such inability would allow the first user to transfer one copy of the mp3 or video file to the second user, while retaining any other copies for him or herself. Thus, unless the transferring party is diligent in checking all of his or her connected and unconnected devices and eliminating extra copies of the transferred content, one cannot be sure that the ownership has been transferred properly. This defeats the purposes of many policies that motivate DRM.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for enabling digital rights management in file transfers.
To facilitate understanding, identical reference numerals have been used, where possible, to designate identical elements that are common to the figures.